FS 3.231: Holistic Resilience

Resilience is a holistic concept with high explanatory and functional value for enacting various system types, such as mountain systems. Despite its rich history and wide contemporary usage, resilience is often reduced to its adaptation component, the ability of infrastructure, forests or settlements to react to and recover from shocks, such as extreme events. The innovative and transformative capacities are underrepresented resilience features. Mountain social-ecological systems (SES), where non-human nature, human nature, and built infrastructure co-exist, are complex systems with emergent, non-linear properties where a holistic resilience lens helps to navigate, enact and partly steer such systems toward desirable futures. How can we understand resilience as a holistic concept, as an assessment tool, as a navigation help that supports us in dealing with uncertainty, in reframing the complexity inherent in mountain SES? In our (academic) cultures we tend to “analyze that system there”, without including a self-reflexive perspective on us as being part of “those systems”. We humans are part of nature, being living systems, and inner resilience needs to be part of a holistic understanding and application of resilience as well to better navigate toward desirable mountain futures. This focus session provides space to present, discuss and synthesize research, design and practice of resilience work from various angles – adaptive, transformative, inner – that incorporate a holistic approach to resilience.